Family Happiness
Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910
a p enguin since 1954
Leo Tolstoy
Family Happiness
Translated by David McDuff
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This translation taken from The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, first published by Penguin Books 2008
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2025 001
Translation copyright © David McDuff, 2008
The text used for this translation is that contained in volume 3 of L. N. Tolstoi, Sobranie sohinenni v 22 tomakh (Moscow, 1979).
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Family Happiness
Part One I
We were in mourning for my mother, who had died in the autumn, and all that winter I lived in the country alone with Katya and Sonya.
Katya was an old friend of the household, the governess who had brought us all up, and whom I had remembered and loved ever since I could remember myself. Sonya was my younger sister. We were spending a gloomy and melancholy winter in our old house at Pokrovskoye. The weather was cold and windy, with the result that the snowdrifts piled higher than the windows; the windows were almost always dim and covered in frost, and for almost the whole winter we never walked or rode anywhere. It was seldom that anyone came to visit us; and those who did added no cheer or joy to our house. They all had sad faces, they all spoke quietly, as though afraid of waking someone up, they did not laugh, they sighed and often wept, as they looked at me and especially little Sonya in her black dress. In the house it was as if one could feel death; the sadness and horror of death hung in the air. Mother’s room was locked, and I had a sense of terror, and something drew me to peep
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into that cold and empty room when I passed it on my way to bed.
I was then seventeen, and in the very year she died Mother had wanted to move to the city in order to bring me out. The loss of my mother was a great grief to me, but I must admit that behind that grief there was also a feeling that I was young and pretty, as everyone told me, but that I was wasting a second winter in seclusion on our estate. Before the end of the winter, this feeling of melancholy, loneliness and sheer boredom increased to such an extent that I never left my room, never opened the piano and never took a book in my hands. When Katya tried to persuade me to occupy myself with the one or the other, I would reply: ‘I don’t feel like it, I don’t feel able for it’, but in my heart a voice said: ‘Why? Why do anything, when the best days of my life are being wasted like this? Why?’ And to this why there was no reply other than tears.
I was told that during this time I grew thin and lost my looks, but this did not even interest me. Why? For whom? It seemed to me that the whole of my life was bound to pass in this same lonely backwater and hopeless melancholy, from which I myself, alone as I was, had neither the strength nor even the will to escape. Towards the end of the winter, Katya began to fear for me and decided to take me abroad no matter what. But for this, money was needed, and we had very little idea of how much remained to us after Mother’s death; with each day that passed we awaited our guardian, who was to come and sort out our affairs.
In March our guardian arrived.
‘Well, thank goodness!’ Katya said to me one day as I wandered from one part of the room to another like a shadow, without occupation, without thought, without desires. ‘Sergey Mikhailych has come, he has sent to inquire about us and wants to come to dinner. You must rouse yourself, my dear Mashechka,’ she added, ‘or what will he think of you? He loved you all so much.’
Sergey Mikhailych was our near neighbour, and had been a friend of our deceased father, though much younger than him. In addition to the fact that his arrival had altered our plans and gave us the possibility of leaving the estate, I had also grown accustomed to loving and respecting him since I was a child, and Katya, in advising me to rouse myself, had guessed that it would give me the greatest pain to appear before Sergey Mikhailych, of all our acquaintances, in a disadvantageous light. In addition to the fact that I, like everyone else in the house, from Katya to Sonya, his god- daughter, to the last coachman, loved him by habit, he had a special significance for me because of something Mother once said in my presence. She said that he was the kind of husband she would like me to have. At the time this seemed to me strange and even unpleasant; my hero was quite different. My hero was thin, haggard, pale and sad. Sergey Mikhailych, on the other hand, was an older man, tall, thickset and, it seemed to me, always cheerful; in spite of that, however, these words of Mother’s stuck in my imagination, and even six years earlier, when I was eleven and he
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said ‘thou’ to me, played with me and called me ‘the girl like a violet’, I would sometimes ask myself, not without fear, what I would do if he were to suddenly want to marry me.
Before dinner, to which Katya added pie with cream, and a spinach sauce, Sergey Mikhailych arrived. I watched through the window as he drove up to the house in a small sleigh, but as soon as he turned the corner I hurried to the drawing- room, wanting to pretend that I wasn’t expecting him at all. But when I heard the thud of feet, his loud voice and Katya’s footsteps, I could not restrain myself and went to meet him. Holding Katya by the hand, he was talking loudly, and smiling. When he saw me, he stopped and looked at me for a while, without bowing. I felt awkward, and sensed that I was blushing.
‘Oh! Is it really you?’ he said in his decisive, straightforward manner, spreading his arms and coming up to me. ‘Is it possible to change so much? How you’ve grown! To think I used to call you “violet”! You are a veritable rose now.’
With his own large hand he took mine, pressing it so firmly and honestly that it almost hurt. I thought he was going to kiss it, and was about to lean towards him, but he gave it another press and looked straight into my eyes with his steadfast and cheerful gaze.
I had not seen him for six years. He had changed greatly; grown older and darker, and now wore sidewhiskers, which did not suit him at all; but there was no change in his simple manners, his open, honest face with
its large features, his clever, brilliant eyes and affectionate, almost childlike, smile.
Five minutes later he had ceased to be a visitor, and had become one of our own for all of us, even for the servants who, as could be seen by their eagerness to oblige, were especially glad of his arrival.
He behaved quite differently from the neighbours who had come to see us after my mother passed away and thought they had to sit with us in plangent silence; he, on the contrary, was talkative, cheerful, and never said a word about our dear mother, to a point where at first this indifference struck me as odd and even improper for a person so close to us. Later, however, I realized that it was not indifference but sincerity, and was grateful for it.
In the evening Katya sat down to pour out the tea in her old place in the drawing-room, as she used to when Mother was alive; Sonya and I sat down beside her; old Grigory sought out one of Father’s pipes and brought it to Sergey Mikhailych, who began to pace up and down the room as he had done in the old days.
‘What a lot of dreadful changes there have been in this house, when one thinks about it!’ he said, coming to a halt.
‘Yes,’ said Katya with a sigh and, putting the lid on the samovar, looked at him, now on the point of tears.
‘I think you remember your father?’ he said, turning to me.
‘Not very well,’ I replied.
‘And how nice it would have been for you to be with him now!’ he said, quietly and thoughtfully looking at
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my head above my eyes. ‘I loved your father very much!’ he added even more quietly, and it seemed to me that his eyes had become more brilliant.
‘And now God has taken her, too!’ said Katya, softly, and at once she put her napkin on the teapot, got her handkerchief out, and began to cry.
‘Yes, there have been terrible changes in this house,’ he repeated, turning away. ‘Sonya, show me your toys,’ he added after a while, and went through to the reception room. With my eyes full of tears I looked at Katya, after he had gone out.
‘What a wonderful friend he is!’ she said.
And, indeed, I felt a warmth and goodness in the sympathy of this good man who was not a member of our family.
From the drawing- room I could hear him moving about with Sonya, and her squeals. I sent tea in to him; and then I heard him sit down at the piano and begin to strike the keys with Sonya’s little hands.
‘Marya Alexandrovna!’ his voice called. ‘Come here and play something.’
I found it pleasant that he should treat me so straightforwardly, and with such a tone of friendly command; I got up and approached him.
‘Play this,’ he said, opening a volume of Beethoven at the adagio of the Sonata quasi una Fantasia. ‘Let us see what your playing is like,’ he added, and walked away with his glass to a corner of the room.
For some reason I felt it was impossible for me to refuse, or to make preambles about how badly I played;
I obediently sat down at the keyboard and began to play as well as I could, though I feared the verdict, knowing that he loved music and knew a great deal about it. The adagio was in keeping with the sense of remembrance that had been evoked by the teatime conversation, and think I played it decently. But when I came to the scherzo, he would not let me finish it. ‘No, you’re not doing very well with that,’ he said, coming over to me. ‘Leave that one, but the first movement was not bad. You seem to have an idea of what music is about.’ This moderate praise delighted me so much that I even blushed. I found it so novel and pleasant that he, my father’s friend and equal, should speak to me seriously, one to one, and not as to a child as he had earlier done. Katya went upstairs to put Sonya to bed, and we were left alone in the reception room.
He told me stories about my father, about how he had come to know him, and the happy times they had spent together, when I was still at my books and toys; and in the stories my father appeared to me for the first time as a simple and charming man, such as I had not known him hitherto. He also asked me about my likes and dislikes, what I read and what I intended to do, and gave me advice. For me he was now no longer the jocular and convivial person who had teased me and made me toys, but a serious, simple and loving man for whom I felt an involuntary respect and sympathy. I found talking to him easy and pleasant, yet at the same time I felt an involuntary tension there. I was fearful about each word I spoke; I so much wanted to deserve his love,